There’s another city inside the city. It lays

its template of odours across postal districts. 

 

One day, perhaps, you will sense it

beneath your speed: a faint hint of fox piss

 

that clings to street lamps and bollards.

Leaving its marker, it establishes different laws.

 

Beneath our fences there are badger setts

and mole runs, scrabbling polities

 

obscured by codes, dissimulation, the plunge

of adits into the dark of the earth.

 

It’s 5 a.m. and a rackety slew of birdcalls

fills in a gap between late revels and the early shifts.

 

All day the city accumulates heat, hatching

prematurely the high rise predators.

 

In a colour supplement once I read

about Year Zero in a city called Phnomh Penh

 

and how the jungle broke it up

when all its people had marched away.